Only a Phase, These Dark Cafe Days

I went to a meeting of the Downtown Writers Group on Saturday. Laura McPhail gave an excellent talk that she entitled I Wrote a Book! Now What? While talking about the various social media sites online she mentioned Goodreads. I had looked at the site a number of years ago but it was not as well populated as it is now and I never got back to it.

Wow! I fed it some of the books that I’ve bought on Amazon along with a selection of my favorite books and authors. It started giving me some excellent suggestions. Then I discovered that you could follow authors and started tagging my favorites left and right. It consumed a good portion of Sunday afternoon.

I was reminded of several authors that I haven’t kept up with in the process. One of them was Rudy Rucker. I’ve loved his books, both his fiction and his non-fiction. I tagged several of his books that I haven’t read “want to read”.

Then today I noticed he had posted a blog post entitled “Simply Gödel,” Phenomonology, and Monads. I will definitely be reading Tieszen’s book when it comes out. I also plan to play with Rudy’s Capow program. I will have to port it to the Mac but that sounds like fun. Then I might transliterate it into Javascript. I may have to do some of the math in C++ for performance’s sake but I think I know how to do that as well.

One thought that came to me while I was reading his blog was how I envied him the sense of freedom that he felt when he retired. I get the impression that he enjoyed his career before he retired. But somehow, retirement represented the freedom to explore the world on his own terms without feeling any kind of obligations to anyone else.

I’ve got to figure out how to continue to support myself in the fashion that I have become accustomed before I can think about retirement. But I am definitely feeling the motivation to actively make plans and start taking actions to make it happen.

I’ve often said that I don’t want to retire in the sense of not doing anything. Rather, I want to retire so that I can do the things that I’m having a hard time finding time to do now while I’m working at my day job. Things like writing science fiction and fantasy. Or like composing and recording my own music. Or writing software to please myself instead of someone else.

Life is to short to spend all of it marching to the rhythm of someone else’s drum. I’ve done that for way to long. The time has come for this caterpillar to come out of his cocoon and take wing. I’ve stayed in that dark, confining space for much too long.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.